Now, a Jury of His Peers

By Elaine Lafferty/Los Angeles

The past five weeks have been a voyage of culinary discovery for Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, the O.J. Simpson defense team's jury consultant. One day she would join Simpson's lawyers for burritos at La Golondrina, another day it would be angelhair pasta at Epicentre or sushi at Horikawa. The cuisine was rarely the same, but the luncheon agenda never varied: how to pick a jury likely to find Simpson not guilty of first-degree murder. Life during jury selection was quite different for Don Vinson, jury consultant for the prosecution. Vinson tirelessly fed the responses of potential jurors to Judge Lance Ito's 80-page questionnaire into computers at the offices of DecisionQuest, handing out sophisticated analyses to the D.A. But after two court appearances early in the process, Vinson disappeared.

When cold computer analysis clashed with the gut instincts of prosecutors Bill Hodgman and Marcia Clark, Vinson was banished from the strategizing. Simpson's defense team, on the other hand, soaked up the services of its jury consultant every step of the way. As late as last week Dimitrius joined defense lawyers at Robert Shapiro's office for a strategy session in which O.J. participated for 45 minutes by telephone. "He's got a real good sense of who he appeals to," said a source close to the defense.

The wisdom of those judgments will not be clear till the verdict is reached, but the conventional wisdom was overwhelming: the jury impaneled last week seemed highly favorable to the defense.

Polls have shown that blacks are more sympathetic to Simpson than whites; eight members of the jury are black. Because a key element of the prosecution's case rests on complex scientific evidence related to blood, prosecutors had hoped for an educated jury; only two jurors attended college. Older, retired people are usually more willing to convict; most jurors are in their 20s and 30s. The single bright spot for prosecutors perhaps -- a critical part of their strategy -- lies in the gender breakdown. Eight jurors are women and one of those, a black woman, has worked with domestic violence victims. The panel's lone white female said her father had beaten her mother.

"We had to play with the cards we were dealt," said a member of the prosecution. They were dealt by Ito, whose frustrations with saturation coverage of the case led him to reject many candidates who regularly read newspapers and magazines and watch TV news. (His approved fare for the dozen jurors: edited tapes of sitcoms and the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.) "Ito cut down the pool of intelligent, independent people, and they weren't just whites," said Harvey Giss, a Los Angeles prosecutor. Even Dimitrius, though pleased with the outcome, said "Both sides lost good jurors in the process."

This week the whole business starts over again as 15 alternates are chosen. In a case where jurors may be sequestered -- and exhausted -- for as long as six months, alternates cannot be an afterthought. As last week's jury selection drew to a close, a tired Clark remarked that everyone had earned their pay. Leaving the courtroom, she bid adieu to Dimitrius, perhaps thinking the defense consultant's job was completed. Dimitrius smiled and said "Not so soon. I'll be back." Dimitrius has been hired for the duration of the trial.